Erewhon by Samuel Butler

I’ll confess that I read this book for a silly reason. Apparently there’s a grocery store called Erewhon and in the latest season of White Lotus, one of the characters is carrying an Erewhon bag and someone online suggested that perhaps the bag serves a double purpose: to show the expensive tastes of the character but also to connect thematically to Samuel Butler’s (sort of) classic. So, I picked it up to see for myself. I’ll admit, there are some conceptual connections, but ultimately I don’t think the flash-second-frame of product placement is meant to be a key to the text that is White Lotus.

Erewhon is a novel first published, I believe, in 1927 and it follows the traditions of Robinson stories, that is, a person is stranded in a place unlike their home and needs to acclimate to a new way of life. These stories tend to be couched in social commentary with a touch of adventure, and in Butler’s case it definitely waxes philosophical. The main character is working abroad and is led to discover new territory because of some superstitions that forbid journeys out from the community spark his interest. After a disorienting journey, he ends up in Erewhon. The plot is pretty bare-bones, although he somehow learns a language and falls in love before running away again, and most of the chapters are philosophical discussions of how the Erewhonians live. I suppose it’s satirical but its intention is not necessarily always clear.

Some of the philosophical underpinnings of Erewhon that stand out are as follows:

• Technology is illegal; the main character is prosecuted for wearing a watch 

• Illness is illegal; your bad luck at the hands of the creator is a testament to not being deserving of good treatment

• Children must sign legal documents that they are responsible for their own miseries and whatnot because…

• The afterlife is, essentially, a perfect idyllic life and when you are dead you’re also unborn; in order to be born you have to leave the perfect paradise by killing yourself and committing to whatever misery life brings on

In the latter part of the book, there are lengthy chapters about the war over technology. Essentially, one philosopher (described as a prophet) describes the idea of machines rapidly evolving beyond their creators, so much so that they are no different from living beings and will eventually surpass all human capabilities. There’s a kind of reverence towards machines and then that reference is further extended into discussing animals. An opposing philosopher tries to argue that vegetables also deserve the same respect as animals and not to be interfered with. There’s a clear Darwinian influence there that challenges the distinctions between our hierarchies.

Returning to some of the main principles of Erewhon, the idea of misfortune being criminal is explained as follows: “You may say that it is your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate” (110). The main character is perhaps guilty of such crime but there’s a paradox at the core of it: “the more you had been found guiltless of the crime imputed to you, the more you would have been found guilty of one hardly less heinous—I mean the crime of having been maligned unjustly” (110).

The discussion around machines is probably the most compelling, developed, and contemporaneously relevant part of the book. The philosopher discusses the rapid acceleration of machines. Again, this is 1927, but it’s so obviously applicable in the context of Artificial Intelligence. The philosopher discusses his fear of the “extraordinary rapidity” with which machines are developing. With a clear echo of evolutionary discourse, the philosopher writes “no class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward.” It then progresses in terms of a slippery slope argument where we might have to consider destroying current machines, despite being harmless, because of the dangers they might bring on later.

The initial stage of machines is that they “receive their impressions through the agency of man’s senses: one traveling machine calls to another in a shrill accent of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other. Had there been no driver, the callee would have been deaf to the caller” (229). At this stage, machines rely on human operators, but Butler notes the concern that “there was a time when it must have seemed highly improbable that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound [...] [but] may we not conceive, then, that a day will come when those ears will no longer be needed, and the hearing will be done by the delicacy of the machine’s own construction?---when its language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own?” (229). Alan Turing eat your heart out.

The slippery slope argument continues to the result that machines surpass and essentially enslave mankind. Machines are superior to man in every way:

“The machine is brisk and active, when the man is weary; it is clear-headed and collected, when the man is stupid and dull; it needs no slumber, when the man is stupid and dull; it needs no slumber, when man must sleep or drop; ever at its post, ever ready for work, its alacrity never flags, its patience never gives in; its might is stronger than combined hundreds, and swifter than the flight of birds; it can burrow beneath the earth, and walk upon the largest rivers and sink not.” (232)

Meanwhile, man is described as “such a hive and swarm of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after all” (232). That’s a pretty incredible observation in its own right: even back in 1927 we’re breaching the walls of the post-human. The question of how individual or “special” humankind is within nature and, heck, within technology is a thought-provoking exploration. By extension, though, and since machines are superior to mankind, Butler asks, “May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?” (232).

If there’s something the book does particularly well, it’s challenging the primacy of mankind. Butler continues on to note that “It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living agents which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies as people in the streets of a city. When we look down from a high place upon crowded thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles of blood traveling through veins and nourishing the heart of the town? No mention shall be made of sewers, nor of the hidden nerves which serve to communicate sensations from one part of the town’s body to another; nor of the yawning jaws of the railway stations, whereby the circulation is carried directly into the heart (232). The passage goes on, but I think it’s evocative enough on its own and my commentary would add very little to your own experience.

Butler echoes the survival of the fittest discourse and how lower animals progress because of struggle: “the weaker die, the stronger breed and transmit their strength” (235). The application of this in machines is pretty compelling: “The machines being of themselves unable to struggle, have got man to do their struggling for them: as long as he fulfills this function duly, all goes well with him—at last he thinks so but the moment he fails to do his best for the advancement of machinery by encouraging the good and destroying the bad, he is left behind in the race of competition; and this means that he will be made uncomfortable in a variety of ways, and perhaps die” (235). It’s a little surreal to think about how we shift from creating and maintaining machines for our own benefit and then becoming reliant on them “So that even now the machines will only serve on condition of being served, and that too upon their own terms; the moment their terms are not complied with, they jib, and either smash both themselves and all whom they can rach, or turn churlish and refuse to work at all.” We can see pretty easily how we are forced to play into the logics of technology: Google expects certain things from you to to make the searches work, for example. We also rely on charging our devices and guiding our lives around digital storage and streaming: “How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?” (235).

In any case, the book offers a glimpse into a moment in history that was asking the same kinds of questions we have today. The plot is pretty lacking—I was hoping for an experience more like his The Way Of All Flesh, which I read a million years ago and remember unexpectedly loving—but there’s enough here to grapple with, even if it reads a little bit dry by modern standards.

Happy reading!

The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, illustrated by Josh Neufeld

  Years ago, I was teaching a Grade 10 English course and had some students reading The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, which was adapted into its graphic novel form by Josh Neufeld. Parts of it stuck with me for a long time. I remembered it as being an illuminating exploration of media and I was hoping to use it, at least in part, for my media studies course. I remembered the book as talking about the funding structure for media and how that impacts the kinds of messages we get to see (think: Noam Chomsky). 

There is some of that, but it isn’t exactly how I remembered. Essentially, The Influencing Machine is a history of journalism. Gladstone hops between different time periods and watershed moments in reporting and discusses the impact of the media in relation to peoples’ everyday experiences. She quotes from a range of primary sources, noting the reactions that people had to news when it became widely available in print—and then widely available on television—and then widely available on the internet. Perhaps it’s because Gladstone is a journalist that she’s able to tell it all as a story. She draws some clear parallels between different historical points in time, the most notable of which (for me) being the way journalism shifted during the Vietnam War and beyond.

There’s a lot to talk about in terms of media evolution: the changing relationship between journalists and the military, the way polls sway us or not (posting this on election day feels serendipitous…), the way that we have come to trust and distrust information. The vignettes Gladstone choose are effectively representative and the balance between her own narratorial voice and the accounts of others is nicely achieved to reflect the times and the commentary on the times. If there’s a downside to Gladstone’s historico-anthropological approach, it is that it is doomed to the marching on of time: even since the book’s publication in 2011, we have seen immense changes to journalism and reportage. While Gladstone references Stephen Colbert’s idea of “truthiness”, the book isn’t so current as to address “fake news” or living in a post-truth AI-content-generated world.

In a book like this (namely: a long-form essay turned into a graphic novel), it runs the risk of being bland, but Josh Neufeld’s illustrations add a liveliness and expressiveness to the work as a whole. The depictions of Gladstone herself are often amusingly cartoonish, transplanting her into different historical eras complete with period-appropriate garb. For a book that is intent on telling the “truth” (while “objectivity” is problematized), Neufeld does not shy away from some creative embellishment. The pages have a liveliness to them that captures the spirit of the time, if not the letter of the time (although there are specific speeches and letters that have been illustrated here).

Gladstone’s book gives us a lot of food for thought, especially as we progress into a world increasingly unchecked for factuality and manipulated into sensationalized stories. Granted, these tactics are nothing new—ever since the conception of news, there has been mis– and dis–information, but the book needs an update, a revised text that explores how the media industry is being influenced by big tech’s privatization of information and its subsequent manipulation over us. The debate of privately / publicly funded news is given an engaging voice with uncertain answers here—and it’s time to take action. Like the book itself, I’ll end this review with a reminder: we get the media we deserve. It’s time to claim it.

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga

  I often think about the role of statistics in inciting people to feel sympathy and take action. The anonymity of numbers, unfortunately, disguises the profoundly horror of some aspects of human existence. It often feels like hundreds or thousands of people die and are absorbed into their status as a statistic. If we know someone, though, how can we quantify the loss of them? Such sorrow is impossible to fathom.

I also think about a line from the poem “Dreamwood” by Adrienne Rich that reads, in part, “she would recognize that poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come.” I wonder about that, too. Do words actually incite change? It feels increasingly unlikely as we see unquantifiable amounts of ink spilled to fight against politicians that daily make the world a worse place and seem undeterred by the looming ridicule on their epitaphs.

Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers is the same kind of knowing: a humanizing knowing. For years, this book was required reading for teenagers and teachers studying Indigenous issues—with good reason. It’s informative with respect to issues that came up in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, including the horrors of residential schools, the dismantling of families through biased adoption practices, the failures of law enforcement and legal proceedings, and so forth. The book is specifically focused, though, on telling the stories of real people. Talaga offers a thorough account of the tragic deaths of Indigenous students in Thunder Bay. The victims, though, are actually humanized in a way rare to nonfiction. Beyond just telling us their names, means of death, culprits responsible, and so forth, we get a sense of their interests, their friendships, their passions.

In turn, Seven Fallen Feathers is the kind of book that inspires us to see things differently, to see abstract issues as tangible. It’s the kind of book that inspires a revolution in thinking and proves instructive in empathy. There are moments of such profound devastation that the idea of blindly accepting injustices becomes beyond ludicrous. The deaths of the children feel personal, and Talaga’s account of the suicide attempts of an adult who cared for these students and lost everything else wring the heart at every level.

Talaga’s gifts as a writer carry the stories to a new level of resonance. She is journalistic in nature, but offers a narrative spin. Seven Fallen Feathers reads almost novelistically. The pacing of the events feels carefully crafted around story beats and the characterization of real people is wrought in fine detail. The language of the book is given such care and it reads beautifully. It has the engaging tone of a true crime podcast, but deals with systemic issues and maintains a deep focus on the people most deeply affected.

The book is compelling in every regard. It shows compassion for the community, offers a critical eye to systems that reinforce injustice, and provides the young people who lost their lives with the dignity and respect that they deserve. From a narrative standpoint, the book works. From a nonfiction informative standpoint, the book works. As a political act, the book works.

Now let’s do the work. Happy reading.